I don't think so, because it's already dead due to weak and incomplete support in Internet Explorer. I've speculated before that the support for PNG's 8 bit alpha mask was intentionally left in a broken state by MSFT to placate or otherwise help out Unisys who owns the LWZ patent that the GIF file format is based on.

To recap, Unisys owns the LWZ patent. MSFT and Unisys have a deal where they try to sell people on the idea that linux/u*nix is bad for their business. They are probably aiming this at Sun and IBM, but the fact that they are in bed together fuels my conspiracy theory that PNG has been stifled on purpose.

The LWZ patent expires on Friday, making it cheaper for applications makers to support LWZ (in Photoshop for example). But this doesn't really mean much, because GIF still has 1 bit alpha masking, and requires us to deal with anti-aliasing manually. PNG is still compelling technology, even if C|Net thinks otherwise, but it will always be stillborn if MSIE doesn't fully support it (and I know there's a hack to get it working right, but hacks are a "significant barrier to entry").

		Explorer is going out of the scene but only from the Mac platform. But is getting stronger on the "dark" side. On the next Windows version, Explorer will be included "more integrated than ever". Thanks to the end of legal battle over Microsoft Corp.'s PC users are weak and do not care about their own future. Micro$oft is a thread to the inovation whatever Micro$oft is saying in the media about dangers of Open Source. Thanks to the 97% of Explorer share market where still using GIF invented in 1988. How people can buy a Windows PC and give, this way, money to a Company which is strangling them? So. What should we do now? How fight back? -Posted by La Shampoo on June 17, 2003 05:11 PM

		Damn it .. I still think that PNGs are better than Gifs. -Posted by Jake of 8bitjoystick.com on June 18, 2003 12:57 PM

		hey that's LZW i believe--bt i had no idea it was expiring on friday--yahoo! good observation/conspiracy theory :) -Posted by jon on June 18, 2003 12:59 PM

		Yeah, it's LZW, for Lempel-Ziv-Welch, the guys/geeks that originally created the algorithm a long, long time ago. -Posted by Jeff Sommer on June 19, 2003 10:20 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).